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Roadside Attraction

But as I sit in my house, so quiet I can hear the blood in my body, the sunset painting the sky a deep, pink hue, I can only think that all of these men are gone and I am still here. I continue, continue, and continue, to still be here. It seems I am in wait, Jodie Foster on the side of the road, letting the world, and the world beyond the world, whisper into my ears.

themarginalian.org

3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever

Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.

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Mary Oliver on the Measure of a Life Well Lived and How to Magnify Your Aliveness

I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you're in it all the same. So why not get started immediately. I mean, belonging to it. There is so much to admire, to weep over.

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The Hardest Part Of History To Tell Is How It Felt

The tissue was just hanging there, loose and slack. My skin had seemingly doubled in size. It was drooping, deflated. I'd never seen anything like it, until I realized I had. It looked like the leg of my grandfather when he was 90 years old.

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No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life

Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.

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George Saunders on the Antidote to Regret

At the end of my life, I know I won't be wishing I'd held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.

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Michael Rosen’s Sad Book: A Beautiful Anatomy of Loss, Illustrated by Quentin Blake

What emerges is a breathtaking bow before the central paradox of the human experience — the awareness that the heart's enormous capacity for love is matched with an equal capacity for pain, and yet we love anyway and somehow find fragments of that love even amid the ruins of loss.

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Do Not Spare Yourself

there is no damnation greater than spending our allotted days in the catatonia of comfort and certainty, our inner lives automated by habit and halogen lit by convenience.

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How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

For as long as we are waiting, we are not living. If we are not careful enough with the momentum of our own minds, we can live out our days in this expectant near-life existence.

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How to Stop Doing and Start Living

Maybe it was the sudden sense of death dislodged, however temporarily, that made me look at the small, seasonal deaths around me with a feeling of kinship. Fallen leaves soften the path I walk on, but not for my sake. The leaves fall to feed the trees, to shelter the creatures who are essential to this forest in a way that I will never be.

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Something Deeper Than Hope: Terry Tempest Williams on Our Stays Against Despair

there must be something deeper than hope — more prayerful, more purposeful, more pulsating with aliveness.

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When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive

Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only be aware of a fraction of what's inside us from moment to moment.

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What Forgiveness Takes

about its quiet power to dislodge the lump of blame from the thorax of time and fill the lung of life with the oxygen of the possible, about how you bless your own life when you forgive your mother, forgive your father, forgive the person for whom your love was not enough, forgive the person for whom your love was too much, forgive yourself, over and over and over.

3quarksdaily.com

Thursday Poem

But hang on here while we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

themarginalian.org

How to Get Love Less Wrong: George Saunders on Breaking the Patterns that Break Our Hearts

We want to believe that love is singular and exclusive, and it unnerves us to think that it might actually be renewable and somewhat repetitive in its habits. Would your current partner ever call his or her new partner by the same pet name he/she uses for you, once you are dead and buried? Well, why not? There are only so many pet names. Why should that bother you? Well, because you believe it is you, in particular, who is loved (that is why dear Ed calls you "honey-bunny"), but no: love just is, and you happened to be in the path of it.

themarginalian.org

The Continuous Creative Act of Holding on and Letting Go: 10 Beautiful Minds on the Art of Growing Older

to grow old is not a punishment but a privilege — that of having survived the loneliness of childhood, the brash insecurity of youth, the turmoil of middle age, in order to begin the continuous creative act of holding on while letting go.

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How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time

I cannot Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on Outside our fates.

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What Happens When We Die

Whatever our beliefs, these sensemaking playthings of the mind, when the moment of material undoing comes, we — creatures of moment and matter — simply cannot fathom how something as exquisite as the universe of thought and feeling inside us can vanish into nothingness.

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What a Weasel Knows That We Forget: Annie Dillard on How to Live

life stares mutely back at us, immense and indifferent, having abled us with opposable thumbs and handicapped us with a consciousness capable of self-reference that renders us dissatisfied with the banality of mere survival.

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Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time

Time is divided into two rivers: one flows backward, devouring life already lived; the other moves forward with you exposing your life. For a single second they may be joined. Now.